Supplemental: The Times attempts to report on tests!

It seems to us they failed: We’re often amazed by the way our biggest newspapers report on the nation’s schools.

So it was this morning, when the New York Times published a 1600-word front-page report about the use of standardized tests to rate New York State teachers.

Governor Cuomo wants to extend the practice. According to reporter Kate Taylor, his proposals, which teacher groups largely oppose, “would both increase the weight of test scores, to 50 percent of a teacher’s rating, and decrease the role of their principals’ observations.”

Should test scores constitute 50 percent of a teacher’s rating? That strikes us as a bad idea. We were struck by Taylor’s failure to state an obvious reason why it seems like a bad idea.

For what it’s worth, we aren’t opposed, as a matter of principle, to the use of test scores in evaluating teachers. We assume that principals have always used test scores in some such way. Consider a hypothetical example from the distant past:

In the spring of 1970, we administered the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills to a class of Baltimore fifth-graders. At that time, the thought didn’t cross our minds that the test results would be used to evaluate us.

That said, suppose our principal noticed that Teacher Smith’s fourth-grade students got horrible test scores year after year. Wouldn’t she have been obligated to figure out why that was happening?

Governor Cuomo wants to go well beyond that. He wants to use student scores in the annual ratings of all teachers.

Near the end of her lengthy report, Taylor presented some objections to this idea. As you can see, her explanation was fuzzy:

TAYLOR (3/23/15): John Bierwirth, the superintendent of the Herricks school district, also on Long Island, where 93 percent of the teachers were rated highly effective, said that in devising his district’s evaluation system, he had intentionally tried to create a cushion to counterbalance the portion of the ratings based on test scores, which for an individual teacher can bounce up and down from year to year.

[T]he movement to weigh scores heavily in teacher evaluations has lost some steam. The fact that ratings based on test scores can vary from year to year has led to concern about teachers being unfairly penalized. Additionally, the transition to tougher, Common Core-aligned tests, and the associated drop in scores, has left many teachers, administrators and parents skeptical of the validity of the results. In a Quinnipiac University poll conducted this month, disapproval of the use of test scores helped drag Mr. Cuomo’s approval rating down to 50 percent, his lowest ever.

“Most leaders, even those who support teacher evaluation reform, have decided to reduce the degree to which the evaluations depend on student achievement results,” Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education reform organization, said.

“That’s partly to try to make the evaluations more palatable to teachers, but it’s also because they’re trying to make these evaluations more reliable, and there are legitimate technical concerns with the value-added scores,” Mr. Petrilli said, referring to the method by which teachers’ impact on their students’ test results is calculated.

That was pretty much it. Test scores can bounce up and down from year to year! Also, “there are legitimate technical concerns with the value-added scores,” the one quoted expert said.

None of those statements are “wrong.” That said, they constitute a very fuzzy tea. Meanwhile, we were struck by the problem which didn’t yodel:

What happens when teachers cheat?

Duh! Unless Cuomo has come up with a very strong security program, that would be an obvious problem with his proposal. Hoping to get a strong evaluation, today’s Teacher Smith might cheat his ascot off with his fourth-grade students.

This means that Teacher Smith will get an inappropriately good evaluation. And the problem doesn’t end there:

The following year, those kids’ test scores will come back to earth when they’re in the fifth grade with Teacher Jones. As a result, Teacher Jones, who didn’t cheat, will get an inappropriately bad evaluation.

Do reporters at the New York Times know that cheating occurs? We’re fairly sure they do! Just last Tuesday, a news report in the Times ran beneath this headline:

In the past few years, cheating scandals have been so huge that even our most famous newspapers have managed to report them. But by force of habit and dint of culture, reporters still fail to connect the dots when it comes to a topic like this.

Has Governor Cuomo thought about this? We don’t have the slightest idea! Our mightiest paper, the New York Times, seems disinclined to ask.

24 comments:

IMHO Bob nailed it when he assumed that principals have always used test scores in some such way. Local principals should be far better able to evaluate their school's teacher performance than the Governor of the state sitting in Albany. It seems counterproductive for some centralized person, who isn't even a teacher, to think he knows better than every local principal.

Or, put another way. If Governor Cuomo really does know better than each local principal, then he should be focused on the problem of getting better principals.

A real press would note that public school reformer Andrew Cuomo, like the overwhelming majority of the most prominent self-professed educational reformers, including Barack Obama, Arne Duncan and his wife, Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, Michelle Rhee and Davis ("Waiting for Superman") Guggenheim, attended expensive private schools and grew up with about as much understanding of the challenges in urban public schools as, say, Prince William.

A real press would also wonder why a reform movement has almost no genuine experts among their advisers -- people with actual experience teaching in those public schools -- and would wonder if they have been deliberately excluded from the conversation because they realize how ridiculous the reformers' theories are.

A real press would also wonder how you can build a movement with no empirical or theoretical support for its positions other than anecdotes about bad teachers they think they remember who weren't fired.

A real press would note that in a merit pay system, the teachers who earn merit pay will be the very ones who went into the profession because they love teaching and are least motivated by money -- in other words, if merit pay is supposed to make teachers try harder, the net result will be less than zero: the identical effort from the ones who win the awards, and a mass of pissed off teachers who probably will feel less driven to go the extra mile.

So you are saying that other than a melting intellectual culture, a profession filled with people who would cheat on evaluations, and people in charge who have no idea what they are doing, everything is fine?

Cheating can be as simple as suggesting that certain kids be absent on test day. When you job and pay both depend on test scores there is too much incentive for teachers to manipulate their scores. People get desperate when their livelihood is at stake.

You are correct to point out the impact on students when teachers encourage test cheating. It does teach the wrong life lessons. Just as students tend to cheat when teacher demands are unreasonable, teachers are people and they too will cheat if they must in order to keep their jobs in a capricious system that rewards only high scorers.

There was an interesting letter a few years ago in the CTA Magazine (California Teacher's Union). One teacher with excellent scores wondered how she could suddenly become a terrible teacher just by changing school districts.

All this NY Times reporter had to do was ask any teacher why they are opposed to value-added evaluation.

Here in Howler village you can count on liberals like Bob to demand teachers be dragged out of their classrooms and onto the front pagess to be upbraided for the criminal element dominating their profession.

"The following year, those kids’ test scores will come back to earth when they’re in the fifth grade with Teacher Jones. As a result, Teacher Jones, who didn’t cheat, will get an inappropriately bad evaluation."

Interesting that Bob would use "fifth grade" to explain a bad teacher evaluation. Isn't that the grade he once taught, decades ago?

You know, Bob loves to lecture about jumping to conclusions and not making wild accusations without the evidence to back it up. Now it seems to me that if the fourth grade teacher is cheating and the fifth grade teacher is not, and there is a big drop in test scores across the board in those classrooms every year, then that would be rather obvious, don't you think?

But hey, that all just goes to show how useless test scores are to measure anything. Except, of course, for measuring those wonderful gains made by our kids using rough rules of thumb, to prove what a wonderful job our nation's teachers are doing.

And while we chide the press for failing to connect the dots, let us imagine a nation full of principals so lazy that their only method of teacher evaluation is test scores and so stupid they can't catch all that fourth grade cheating right under their noses.

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Hey, trolls! You do know the difference between tests where there is an incentive to cheat and those where there isn't don't you? Tests where we've found evidence of cheating and those we haven't?

No, you apparently don't.

Also, you idiots assume that Somerby, because he mentions teacher cheating, thinks that's the major source of problems with testing. In fact, it's probably not even the major source of cheating. Administrator-level test-doctoring rather than individual teacher cheating has frequently been documented. No surprise, because up-to-now the locus of most incentive to cheat has been at the entire-school level, rather than at the individual classroom level.

But of course I am failing, as a commenter, to observe Rule One: The Bigger Problem Is Always Somerby!!

Duh! Unless Cuomo has come up with a very strong security program, that would be an obvious problem with his proposal. Hoping to get a strong evaluation, today’s Teacher Smith might cheat his ascot off with his fourth-grade students.....

Do reporters at the New York Times know that cheating occurs? We’re fairly sure they do! Just last Tuesday, a news report in the Times ran beneath this headline:

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